Post-Covid-19 design will eventually save the world (?)...(and bloody more than that?)...

In photo above: The Contactless Door Opener by Xeproto Design, 3D Printed: to turn doorknobs, open cardoors and ring doorbells without touching their surface! Made In Canada. Check more of this company's truly great designs and purchase the CDO here.

New design solutions emerge face to the pandemic, (or they already were there all along but we did not care enough to discover them). Apart from new, everyday tools for all stepping into our lives here we come with a list of items, technologies and services, designed to do things differently and helping us enjoy life through a whole new prespective.

For spectacle-wearers, Tokujin Yoshioka has come up with a template for an essential and minimalist mask, in perfect Japanese style, which only takes minutes to make by simply cutting a sheet of PET or PVC to the shape of the face and making two incisions where indicated for the arms of the spectacles. Seeing (the video) is believing! Lego has also modified some of the machines normally used to fabricate its famous blocks to produce visors for front-line health workers.

The electric control plate developed by the Milanese studio PLH ,(in photo bellow) eliminates the proliferation of bacteria from the surface of switches and support frames in just a few hours. This is achieved thanks to the Abaco finish, a process invented by the Italian company Protim®, as part of its PVD-Physical Vapour Deposition. Treatments. It is available in three different finishes – Gun metal, Grey05 and Gold and carries Japanese Industrial Standard JIS Z 2801/A12012 certification, the most rigorous and widely-applied in the world.

Manuela Simonelli and Andrea Quaglio have developed a bacteria-proof solution for mobile phones, for the French company Lexon. The Oblio (in photo bellow) wireless charging station with built-in sanitiser looks like an elegant small vase and is capable of fully charging telephones in 20 minutes, while a UV-C LED sterilises the screen.

In order to bust the domestic stress caused by Coronavirus-forced home isolation, the global studio Woods Bagot has designed a modular AD-APT system that can be used to divide open-plan living spaces into areas for work, play, fitness, rest areas and so on. This series of walls and screens is a response to the new demands of being at home 24/7 (an idea of the system in photo bellow).

Design your own intimate contemporary jewellery dream ring with the 3D-Maker Ringz app developed by Miro Straka, like she gorgeously did in the photo bellow: 

VIROFORMULA™ is the new Albini Group fabric which effectively protects against viruses and bacteriathanks to the HeiQ Viroblock cutting-edge technology. The latter prevents the fabrics from becoming a host for harmful viruses and bacteria and as a consequence reducing the risk and speed of contamination and re-transmission.

VIROFORMULA™ fabrics actively inhibit viruses and kill bacteria upon contact on the surface in a few minutes. It has been created for all types of clothing, making them ideal for the production of shirts, jackets and trousers, as well as for masks, gowns and any other garment.

The application of this treatment does not change the physical and mechanical properties of the fabrics. The effect of textile finishing lasts up to 30 washes at a mild temperature.

The products used in the VIROFORMULA ™ treatment are certified by HeiQ according to the ISO 20743, ISO 18184 and AATCC 100 standards for their antibacterial and antiviral characteristics.They have also been tested for the safety of people and are dermatologically non-irritating, harmless to the skin and body and environmentally sustainable.

Art and design exhibitions from the safety of your home can be another exciting, yet different experience with the virtual gallery app artland (to discover in artland.com).

Spanish SAS launches e-learning platform: SAS 'new Do Great Things From Home hub offers content and virtual experiences to help public bodies, companies and employees reinvent themselves in this moment of confinement. That is how Do Great Things From Home is born, a hub full of free content with which executives, IT professionals, data scientists or citizens in general can take advantage of innovative resources, grow in their professional careers, add value to their companies and keep get up to date on the main technological trends and news in your sector of activity.

The website presents itself as the digital alternative to face-to-face meetings, which were the usual focus in the technology sector until the beginning of the pandemic. On the online site, designed to inspire and motivate people to do extraordinary things for society, in companies and in the world in general, you can find Webinars Live and OnDemand, courses on advanced analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, live demonstrations and blogs specialized.

Do Great Things From Home is organized into four key areas: 4Business, 4Data Scientists, 4Social, and 4Life.

That's all for now. We will expand this very list with more new design to help us out with the challenge of the pandemic - and not only that- the following weeks. Until then, take care of yourselves and each other.

#westandtogether

A4D-D4A 💙💚🙌

SCRIBIT' ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES: A NEW TOOL TO ACCESS, STUDY, EXHIBIT, CURATE, SHARE AND CHERISH ART & DESIGN TO THE MAX!

Drawing robot Scribit brings the world’s oldest painting on people’s walls and that’s only the beginning! Designed by CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, the award-winning design and innovation firm led by MIT professor Carlo Ratti, Scribit is a write & erase robot that can turn any vertical surface into a low-refresh screen on which to display information from the web, user-generated content and art. Functioning as a “printer for walls”, Scribit ushers in a new way of presenting digital content and allows the user to instantly reconfigure and personalize a vertical plane. Following one of the most successful global crowdfunding campaigns of 2018, the device has been named one of the Best Inventions of the Year by Time magazine in late 2019. 

 At a time when a home is the only place to be and public exhibitions are inaccessible, the drawing robot Scribit brings humankind’s oldest painting to your wall, celebrating the25th anniversary of the discovery of the Chauvet Caves in France. The drawing -inspired to one of the evidence of Upper Paleolithic life - aims to make the restricted Cave accessible to all. The 25th anniversary of the discovery of the Chauvet Cave in Southern France coincides with the current worldwide lockdown that forces people to rediscover the pleasure of experiencing new ways of enjoying art and design in their leisure time. Scribit is designed to allow users to draw on their walls in the same way our ancestors did with their own tools tens of thousands of years ago: man marking walls to make his home. Using robotics to gain access to the cave paintings is a means of democratizing the rock art contained within it, making the paintings accessible to all. 

The experience can be tested here.

In a time when our curiosity is flattened by boredom, a plethora of online trivialities, fastpaced scrolling and seconds-long attention spans, Scribit aims to reduce our screen time, acting as a low-refresh screen to provide an analog format for consuming digitally produced and shared content. The Chauvet Cave is the tenth installment of the Scribit Originals series, which aims to bring original artworks by the world’s leading artists, designers and public intellectuals to the Scribit platform in order to share knowledge, a story, cause or concept just as our prehistoric ancestors did through their Rock Art in the Chauvet Caves. This visual content for your wall will be featured in a curated online collection and available for download by the growing community of Scribit users. 

The people behind the invention: 

Scribit team: Carlo Ratti, Andrea Baldereschi (CMO), Andrea Bulgarelli (CTO), Ivan Lunardi (Senior Developer), Matteo Stoppa (Head of R & D), Danilo Ronchi (Developer), Riccardo Mereu (Junior R &D Firmware Developer), Gabriele Pertile (Junior UX/UI Designer), Marco Conte (Product Design Manager), Peter White (Scribit Originals), Svilena Sivova (PR and Business Development), Stela Karabina (Press Office), Federico Morando (Digital Content Specialist), Olaia Beltran (Social Media Manager), Zakaria Zarrouk (Technical Support Manager), Seyedalireza Khatoonabadi (Technical Associate).

We warmly thank Andrea Baldereschi, co-founder and CMO of Scribit, for the answers on our questions bellow regarding this device combining poetry with robotic intelligence- a tool about to stir the waters on curatorial, creative and educational design operations in the core of many different establishments and organizations around the globe. 

All4design-design4All:  Can the same technology  be used to assist/facilitate people with disabilities-even quadriplegic people- to generate and illustrate their creative design ideas? 

Andrea Baldereschi-CMO Scribit: The Scribit app and consequently Scribit can't be controlled through voice commands as of today. It's a feature that we are planning to develop in Q3/Q4 2020 as we strongly believe that creativity must be accessible to anyone. We really love the idea of being able to control Scribit with your voice: imagine how many interesting synergies might happen from multiple people collaborating in person or remotely on a piece of art! 

A4D-D4A: How do you see the evolution of Scribit as a tool in other creative sectors apart from 2D painting? 

A.B./CMO Scribit: Scribit has pushed the boundaries of drawing as traditionally conceived, by making art accessible to all. Moreover, at Scribit we have been promoting universal messages of equality, sustainability and spirituality in the last year by teaming up with several artists, public intellectuals, scientists and spiritual leaders to create the Scribit Originals, a series of authentic artworks to be streamed into people's homes.  

A4D-D4A:  Could eventually any private household adopt the technology and use Scribit for DIY interior solutions for instance or it is viewed mostly as a tool inside the functions of a public institution ex.a museum? 

A.B./CMO Scribit: We aim, indeed, to promote an interactive use of Scribit not just as a tool for drawing but also as a way of experiencing new alternatives to screen addiction. Public offices, schools and institutions can use Scribit to transform any vertical surface into a canvas.
  
A4D-D4A:  Which way can Scribit help in Art & Design education (schools and universities)? 

A.B./CMO Scribit: We believe in technology and robotics as a vehicle for spreading universal messages and inclusive content instead of using technologies just as a passive hobby. For this reason, we constantly seek for new collaborations to help to spread powerful and positive messages. 

EXPLORE SCRIBIT ORIGINALS! 

Scribit Originals is a series of drawings inspired by well-known artists, poets and designers, which Scribit brings to people’s homes and everyday spaces. Each original constituting the selection has an underlying powerful message to convey, with the project culminating with the totality of works scheduled originallyto be exhibited at Milan Design Week in April 2020, (:cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic). 

Take care, keep calm and enjoy Scribit! 

A4D-D4A💟😃